INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE & GOVERNANCE RECOVERY

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Military Operation Architects in Partnership with the 'South Texan's Property Rights Association', whose members are included in photo with McCaffrey. Photo Source:BR McCaffrey Associates LLC, at http://www.mccaffreyassociates.com/pages/photos.htm, accessed February 9, 2011.

"I. PURPOSEA: The Task In June 2011, Texas Department of Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples requested that two senior military officers, Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.) and Gen. Robert Scales (Ret.), develop and recommend a military-style strategy and operational and tactical requirements to secure the Texas portion of the U.S.-Mexico border. He also requested specific information related to the financial, manpower, technology and other resources needed to secure the Texas-Mexico border; and ways in which the roles and resources of U.S. federal agencies could be optimally deployed to facilitate implementation of these recommendations" (15).

"Texas Rangers Lead the Fight

The first principle of Texas border security operations is to empower local law enforcement. Soldiers often say that bad strategies cannot be salvaged by good tactics--- but bad tactics can defeat a good strategy. This saying simply reinforces the truism that no national strategy that seeks to defeat narco-terrorism can be adequately confronted unless tactical units, such as local police and federal border security stations, are properly staffed, resourced, competent and well-led.

"The Texas Rangers lead a cooperative program that brings together a ground, air and marine assault capability. Ranger Reconnaissance Teams are the tactical combat elements in the war against narco-terrorists. Each participating federal, state and local agency voluntarily adds its unique capabilities to the teams. The Texas Highway Patrol acts as an outer perimeter for the Rangers by funneling traffic toward Ranger border positions.Tactical contact teams, deploying along the Rio Grande in small, concealed positions, are able to respond immediately to intelligence from Autonomous Surveillance Platform (ASP) units, DPS and National Guard surveillance helicopters, as well as calls to UCs from local police or citizens. DPS Dive Teams conduct SONAR scans of the Rio Grande and assist in recovery of vehicles and contraband in splashdown areas" (12-13).

LAW-Defense Commentary:

Not coincidentally, State and Federal military strategy on the so-called 'war on terror' will increase endangerment and suffering to humanity in the Texas-Mexico border region, many who are Indigenous peoples--not immigrants--of the region and the Americas.

In the Texas-Mexico border region, it is racism, land dispossession, subjugation, exploitation effected through organized armed violence, militarization and militarism which havenegatively affected human suffering, disease, poverty, hunger, health, biodiversity, and cultural revitalization. The accumulative violent impacts of war and armed conflict has impacted Indigenous peoples which in the above scenario are abstracted and distorted as minor factors. Once again, a resource war is being waged and Indigenous peoples are being crafted as 'suspects', 'expendables', and 'foreigners' in our own lands, and violence is key to the colonizers' war.

The questions arewho are the privileged 'local' decision-makers architecting the use of a military assault against the least privileged and most culturally, socially, economically, and legally disadvantaged communities along the Texas border?And, who are the so-called 'local' interest groups colluding at the table with the State and Federal government to destroy lands, cultures, families, heritage, histories, and existences? And, to what extent is their an entanglement or intersection between this war plan and uranium mining, oil extraction, water privatization, and mega-projects (border wall, highways, rail systems) in the region? What are the social relations at the decision-making table?

Those responsible for the architecting of neo-ethnocide are enabling the U.S. and Texas military industrial complex to 'throw-away' the Indigenous communities along the Texas border deemed retrograde, 'savage', in the way of elites' development. The use of massively organized violence, and the construction of Indigenous peoples as 'suspects', and as expendable in the war against Mother Earth, i.e. colonialist 'progress', is a genocidal movement.

LAW-Defense denouncesthe "Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment." It is the current-day extension of the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny into the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and a revisiting of the massacres and removals experienced by our foreparents. It is a template for genocide.

Lipan Apache Women Defense (LAW-Defense) is an Indigenous Peoples' Organization. It supports local capacity building, documentation, research, and investigations related to Indigenous peoples' rights affirmed in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ratified in 2007, and adopted by the United States on December 16, 2010.

LAW-Defense documents and advocates for the rights of the indigenous originarios, Nde', and Nakaiiye-Nde lineal clan members of Lipan Apache peoples who are the Real People: original rancheria communities along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo.

Context:Lipan Apache women of El Calaboz Rancheria took up the cultural, social, legal, political, and economic protection against armed and forced dispossession of Indigenous Peoples' lands by the U.S. D.H.S. et al.

We organized community support, empowerment and decision-making processes to protect integral and inherent Indigenous relationships to lands, sacred sites, burial grounds, and biodiversity in the face of a series of armed and forced takings of local peoples' lands, as a direct consequence of the implementation of the U.S. Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Indigenous peoples from the El Calaboz Rancheria lineal clans stood firm against the U.S. possession of traditional lands. Securing our lands, resources, livelihoods, ecologically-based economies, and way of life are at the heart of the matter for Indigenous Peoples of the Lower Rio Grande, who continue to struggle against settler and state violence stemming from colonization by Spaniards in the early 1520s, and subsequent waves of settlement, development, and privatization by Euro-American colonizers.

The United Statesand Nde' Customary PerspectivesIn U.S. law, there are significant legal fictions which assume the religious and racial superiority of Euro-American settler juridical systems above those of indigenous peoples inherent and inalienable rights to self-governance, lands and territories. The following models entail excessive aggression and armed violence, which were used to dispossess lands illegally through force and coercion against Lower Rio Grande River communities:1. Eminent Domain, 2. the Declaration of Taking, and 3. Condemnation Proceedings. Impacted Nde' and Nnee Peoples of the Texas-Mexico Border--Beyond the Doctrine of DiscoverySpecifically impacted Indigenous people, the Lipan Apache, Jumano-Apache, and Mexican-American land grant peoples whose ancestors' presence in the hemisphere pre-date European conquest.

The Lipan Apache Women Defense organizedlegal, social, cultural and political resistance to U.S. militarized violence, abuse of state power, and abuse of the Rule of Law

This work raises critical questions and organizes forums for serious debate, participation and collective decision-making about Indigenous inherent Aboriginal Title, and the State's sovereignty.To date, the U.S. border wall project has been unsuccessful in El Calaboz Rancheria, Lower Rio Grande Valley, South Texas because it has not achieved its goal: genocide and erasure of Indigenous peoples, presence, history, creativity, and resilient spirit.

By foregrounding community organization, documentation, research and education the Lipan Apache Women Defense has strengthened the Indigenous People's resolve to persist in Indigenous, U.S. and International law systems to restore democratic principles and rule.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR EFFORT to PROTECT INDIGENOUS LAND RIGHTS ALONG THE BORDER AND BORDER WALL. (FEBRUARY 2012)

Contested Rights--"Independent Indians" between the State and U.S. Development and Expansion (Map permission: Dr. Brian DeLay, Historian, in "Independent Indians and the U.S. Mexico War", The American Historical Review.